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March 18, 2009
Next generation of LBS growth will come from geoweb feeds
Location Based Services continue to develop commercially despite the Credit Crunch. Why? The trite answer is that LBS offer users exceptional value to users... the 800 'location' applications in the iPhone App Store would be one piece of evidence for that. There is also continued innovation in LBS that is bringing new solutions to the market, for example, lastminute.com's NRU augmented reality application on Android. However, I think there is another current and compelling force that is driving LBS... one that has not been sufficiently acknowledged... and that is the explosion of data sources for LBS. The rapid growth of availability of data sources for LBS is re-balancing the early technical development of LBS, complementing the early concentration on software functionality.
Relatively few of the early commercial LBS were data-rich, with location-based social networking, mobile search and mobile gaming being examples of services that generated their own data. Those LBS that were based on data were not new services, but mobilisations of existing applications, notably navigation systems like satnav. There have been some distinguished exceptions to this rule like Viewranger, Zillow and Camineo (full disclosure: City University is a shareholder in Camineo). However, these innovative services have all had to build their own platforms like Where and Spime have done in order to launch services with data.
However, new data rich LBS are now emerging rapidly due to the availability of new location-enhanced platforms like Android and iPhone, and upgrades to the established mobile platforms like the forthcoming Windows Mobile Silverlight platform with a new location interface. We are also seeing new location-enhanced browsers like Mozilla's Fennec for mobile which will be able to read device location and access web feeds based on GeoRSS and mapping services like Google Maps.
The reason that geoweb feeds will become a major driver for LBS growth is because it will lower the bar for the syndication of geospatial content, and there are a huge number of potential providers who are ready to open access to their data in this way if the audience shows an appetite for the content. We can expect to see newspapers, transport providers and government agencies all developing location-based access to their content in this way: see London Transport's web feeds, for example. As we see geoweb feeds launched by major organisations we are likely to see 'network-effect growth', where the low cost of setting up the feeds and easy access through the mobile browser means both supply and demand grow at compound rates. So: just when you think LBS is growing as fast as it can do and the credit crunch might slow it down, the latent potential of data previously too expensive to mobilise might well emerge to power even faster growth.
Jonathan Raper
Posted by raper at March 18, 2009 11:37 AM